If you receive Combat-Related Special Compensation, or you were ever told your back pay was capped at six years, this is worth a few minutes. That limit is gone, and it took a Supreme Court ruling plus two rounds of DoD policy to actually get there.
In Soto v. United States, decided unanimously on June 12, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal Barring Act's standard six-year statute of limitations does not apply to CRSC. The Court's reasoning was that CRSC operates as its own self-contained compensation system, separate from the general claims process that six-year limit was written for. In plain terms: the government's long-standing practice of capping retroactive CRSC awards at six years before the application date was never actually supported by the law.
This is the detail worth knowing, because it's easy to assume the ruling settled everything immediately. It didn't. In August 2025, DoD issued interim guidance that replaced the old six-year cap with a new restriction of its own: for applications filed on or after August 20, 2025, your effective date would generally be tied to when you filed, not when you actually became eligible. A January 2026 memo reaffirmed that same restriction.
That mattered, because it meant a Veteran who genuinely qualified for CRSC years earlier could still lose out on back pay simply based on when their paperwork went in, which is close to the same problem the Supreme Court had just ruled against.
DoD reversed course. On May 14, 2026, it issued the CRSC Effective Dates Rescission memo, which withdrew both the August 2025 and January 2026 restrictions and directed the services to use the effective date set by the CRSC statute itself, regardless of when the application was filed.
Under the current guidance, your CRSC effective date goes back to the first date you met all three eligibility conditions at the same time: you were eligible for military retired pay, you were receiving VA disability compensation with retired pay waived, and you met the combat-related eligibility criteria under the CRSC statute. Filing date no longer caps how far back that goes.
There are still statutory floor dates depending on your retiree category, and they're specific:
These aren't a six-year rolling window. They're fixed dates written into the underlying statute, and they're the actual limit now, not the application-date restriction DoD tried to add in between.
Start with the effective date currently listed on your most recent CRSC award letter from DFAS. Compare that to the date you can document you actually met all three eligibility conditions above. If there's a gap between those two dates, and your case doesn't fall outside the statutory floor for your retiree category, that gap may represent money you haven't been paid yet.
We're not VA accredited, and we don't file or represent claims before the VA. What we do is exactly this kind of paperwork detective work: going through an award letter, a claim history, and the actual dates involved with fine-tooth-comb thoroughness, because policy changes like this one don't fix themselves and DFAS isn't going to flag it for you automatically.
A lot of our team are Veterans, military spouses, or military family members ourselves, which means issues like CRSC and concurrent receipt aren't abstract to us. We go through every file looking at the whole picture, not just what's already on paper. Every case is different, and reviewing your dates doesn't guarantee there's a gap to find, but it's worth a real look rather than assuming DFAS already caught it.
If you want more background on how secondary issues like this get missed in the first place, our FAQs page covers more of what we hear, and later this week we're covering another benefit area that gets overlooked just as often: secondary conditions tied to an original service-connected injury.
👉 Get a second set of eyes on your CRSC dates